| Warning: long post, may contain rants. |
[Mar. 30th, 2004|08:13 pm] |
Silence is golden, unless you're perched on the edge of your seat waiting for a noise. This journal (to swerve briefly into the pompous third-person style of writing) has been inundated with emails asking where the author is and what he is up to. Well, one email anyway. A very brief one. But it was appreciated.
It has been a pretty troublesome few days, in fact. Stand by for excessive amounts of bile regarding:- The National Trust
- Pokey uninhabitable holiday accommodation
- The BBC's best-ever sitcom contest
- Rapacious seagulls
- Seafood that looks back at you when you look at it
Right now, I should be sitting in a delightful little cottage in St Ives, a glass of scotch close to hand, thinking great thoughts and doing a little light writing whenever I can summon the effort to raise my weary hand. The very picture of the effete Englishman at play.
Instead I am exactly where I was last week, St Ives a distant dream (well, an 11-mile drive away actually, but why spoil a well-crafted phrase with accuracy? I did train as a journalist and pursue a career in politics, after all).
Saturday was a dodgy day. No doubt about it. By 11am we'd packed, hoovered and vacated the rather wonderful cottage near Helford where we'd just spent a very pleasant week. Our plan was to stop off and visit Glendurgan before we moved into the St Ives cottage for the second week.
( Glendurgan )
So after this we went off to St Ives looking forward to slobbing out, but nervously wondering what the day had in store for us as a sting in the tail.
What it had was a cottage so claustrophobic and tacky that we spent the night in the hotel next door and left the next day, never to return.
( St Ives )
The rest of Sunday was pleasantly domestic - comfort food, comfort baths, and metaphorically weeing in corners to re-establish residence - then yesterday we went back to St Ives for the day. I think it was Karl Marx who said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce. Well, for the second time this holiday I had bird's wings beating around my face, and for the second time I was far too close to the unpleasant disembowelling of previously-alive food. No falcon on a glove this time, though.
( Seagulls and stuff )
Today has been quieter. We set off to walk the St Michael's Way, between Cornwall's north and south coasts, but decided not to as it was too late in the day - tomorrow instead. As an alternative we went to Chysauster, a Celtic settlement of stone huts on a hillside. On the way back we found the road by the Naval air station at Culdrose closed by police and had to follow a diversion through narrow lanes behind a cement mixer barely big enough to get through them. I thought little of it but ![[info]](http://piktures.deadjournal.com/userinfo.gif) astrofiammante, who used to report on RAF Northolt, was wiser and said no good ever came from road closures by air bases. Sure enough, the evening news tonight told of a helicopter crash. Minor injuries only, and three airmen walked away unharmed, but the aircraft was a total loss.
And since we got home I've been writing this. For hours. The next one will be shorter.
I promise. |
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